Weldborough is a village in Tasmania in Australia. It’s got the Weld River, which you can go fossicking for sapphires in! In a wetsuit, ‘cos it’s freezing cold.
Kristy Probert runs the Weldborough Hotel, the pub in Weldborough. She was surprised when, from around September last year, she started getting tourists calling about the hot springs in the area. There are no hot springs in Weldborough: [ABC, audio]
In the last couple of months, I’ve just had a lot of people ringing and turning up looking for the Weldborough hot springs … I’m getting daily phone calls and people turning up to the pub.
And there’s an actual website for Tasmania Tours, saying that there’s hot springs in a number of locations in Tasmania, including Weldborough, which is just not the case. So the Weld River, which runs through Weldborough, it’s freezing cold, but it’s definitely not a hot spring.
The Tasmania Tours website really sold you on the experience: [ABC]
Its reputation as a tranquil haven has made it a favourite among local hiking groups, wellness retreat organisers, and anyone wanting to experience one of the more untouched hot springs Tasmania has to offer.
You’ll be shocked to hear the website was full of text and photos generated with AI.
ABC got in touch with Tasmania Tours owner Scott Hennessey. He told them:
Our AI has messed up completely.
Tasmania Tours outsources its marketing posts, and usually they check them — but Hennessey was out of the country at the time. The post went up in July last year. By September, Probert was getting calls about hot springs:
I actually had a group of 24 drivers turn up there two days ago that were on a trip from the mainland,and they’d actually taken a detour to come to the hot springs. And I said, if you find the hot springs, come back and let me know and I’ll shout your beers all night. But they never came back.
Probert phoned and had a good chat with Scott Hennessey and she reassures people that Tasmania Tours is on the level: [Facebook; CNN]
It is hard to keep everything up to date and relevant as a small business. They seem like lovely people, and we’ve all made mistakes. I think this was quite a funny one.
But you can bet Hennessey’s checking everything three times from now on.
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